THE CONCEPTION OF LIBERTY, AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE FOREGOING
SUGGESTIONS.
1. We have now seen that the problem of Self-Government may be
regarded from a point of view other than that which presented it
as a contradiction in terms. The contradiction depended on the
absolute opposition between self and others which was embodied in
the _prima facie_ idea of society; the result of which was that all
increase of individuality and all assertion of self were at the
first view hostile as regarded others, and liberty, the condition
of individuality, became a negative idea, prescribing as it were a
maximum of empty space, to be preserved against all trespassers,
round every unit of the social whole. We saw that notions of this
kind were pushed so far as to endanger the fundamental principle,
according to which self-affirmation is the root of morality, and
it was maintained that the ethical attitude essentially lay in the
negation and limitation imposed by social life upon the natural
tendency to self-assertion. [1] According to these ideas, the self in
society is something less than, if it could so exist, it would {125}
be out of society, and liberty is the arrangement by which, at a
sacrifice of some of its activities, it is enabled to disport itself
_in vacuo_ with the remainder.
[1] Pp. 27 and 73.
But if we may give weight to the suggestions of the two previous
chapters, the assumptions which we work with are transformed. The
difference of principle is that the average individual, such as each
of us takes himself to be in his ordinary [1] trivial moods, when he
sees, or thinks he sees, nothing in life but his own private interest
and amusement,--this average individual is no longer accepted as the
real self or individuality. The centre of gravity of existence is
thrown outside him. Even his personality, his unique and personal
being, the innermost shrine of what he is and likes to be, is not
admitted to lie where a careless scrutiny, backed by theoretical
prejudice, is apt to locate it. It is not in the nooks and recesses
of the sensitive self, when the man is most withdrawn from things
and persons and wrapped up in the intimacies of his feeling, that
he enjoys and asserts his individual self to the full. This idea is
a caricature of the genuine experience of individuality. It is true
that to feel your individuality is to feel something distinctive,
which gives you a hold and substance in yourself and a definite
position among others, and, it may be, against them. But on a careful
consideration, it will be found that this substance and position are
always sustained by some kind {126} of determinate achievement or
expansion on the part of the self. It always comes from taking hold
of the world in some definite way; which, just because it is definite
and affirmative, is at once a distinct assertion of the self, and
a transition from the private self into the great communion of
reality. The simplest machine will show us that it is the differences
of the parts which enable them to make a whole. And so, we are now
suggesting, it is in the difference which contributes to the whole
that the self feels itself at home and possesses its individuality.
[1] There is a difficulty in stating this point without confusion,
just because the “ordinary” individual, being at the bottom different
from what he seems, is actually determined in all sorts of ways,
consciously and unconsciously, by demands and ideas which go far
beyond what he would admit to determine him.
Following up such thoughts as these, we see that there is a meaning
in the suggestion that our real self or individuality may be
something which in one sense we are not, but which we recognise as
imperative upon us. As Rousseau has said of the social self, we say
more generally of the self or life which extends beyond our average
private existence, that it is more real than we are, and we only feel
ourselves real in proportion as we identify ourselves with it.
With such suggestions in our minds, we see the problem of liberty in
a new light. Liberty, no doubt, is as Rousseau has told us, so far
agreeing with Mill, the essential quality of human life. It is so, we
understood, because it is the condition of our being ourselves. But
now that it has occurred to us that in order to be ourselves we must
be always becoming something which we are not, or in other words, we
must always recognise that we are something more than we have become,
liberty, as the condition of our being ourselves, cannot simply be
something which {127} we have, still less something which we have
always had--a _status quo_ to be maintained. It must be a condition
relevant to our continued struggle to assert the control of something
in us, which we recognise as imperative upon us or as our real self,
but which we only obey in a very imperfect degree. Thus it is that
we can speak, without a contradiction, of being forced to be free.
[1] It is possible for us to acquiesce, as rational beings, in a law
and order which on the whole makes for the possibility of asserting
our true or universal selves, at the very moment when this law and
order is constraining our particular private wills in a way which we
resent, or even condemn. Such a law and order, maintained by force,
which we recognise as on the whole the instrument of our greatest
self-affirmation, is a system of rights; and our liberty, or to use
a good old expression, our liberties, may be identified with such a
system considered as the condition and guarantee of our becoming the
best that we have it in us to be, that is, of becoming ourselves.
And because such an order is the embodiment up to a certain point of
a self or system of will which we recognise as what ought to be, as
against the indolence, ignorance, or rebellion of our casual private
selves, we may rightly call it a system of self-government or free
government; a system, that is to say, in which ourselves, in one
sense, govern ourselves in another sense; not as Mill has said, by
each one of us being subject to all the “others” (taking “others” in
the same sense in which each of us is “one”), {128} but by all of us,
as casual private units, being subject to an order which expresses,
up to a certain point, the rational self or will which, as rational
beings, we may be assumed [2] to recognise as imperative.
[1] For limitations see ch. viii. below.
[2] In principle, actual individual assent is not needed. The
question when the assumption breaks down belongs to the subject of
the duty of rebellion and the significance of punishment.
2. Before proceeding to develop the idea of liberty, we may consider
for a moment the closely analogous idea of “nature” and what is
“natural.”
Like the notion of “liberty” which is that of “being able to be
yourself,” the notion of nature, which is that of “coming to be
_of_ yourself, or _of_ itself,” has always, however imperfectly
apprehended, exercised immense power over the mind. It is felt that
you have touch with reality when you have found something which can
grow of itself. But again, like the notion of liberty, the notion
of nature is apt to be apprehended in a form so partial as to be
practically negative, and in this form, to be given a hostile bearing
against what are, in fact, completer phases of the same idea.
That which is natural, or by nature, in the most obvious sense--what
most plainly appears to have “come of itself”--is what comes first in
time, and what comes with the least putting together the primitive
and the simple as against the late and the complex. And so in the
theoretical inquiry after what is solid and can be relied upon, there
constantly recurs in all ages the tendency to story-telling; to the
narration of what is supposed to have come first, as the simple
{129} spontaneous beginning out of which the world as we know it has
emerged with greatly altered attributes. The note of story-telling is
unmistakable in this naïve theory, whether we find it in poets who
portray the Golden Age, from Hesiod downwards, [1] or represented
as a fallacy of social compact by Plato in the second book of the
_Republic_ [2] or adopted as a juristic theory by Tacitus [3] and
the writers who relied on the idea of a “state of nature,” down to
Rousseau.
[1] The resemblance between Hesiod’s dream of the Golden Age and
modern doctrines of intensive culture is startling, and there is
probably a true historical continuity between them. This does not
involve the assertion that there can be no truth in the latter, but
it does suggest that the disproportionate emphasis laid upon it
(_e.g._ by Fourier and in _Merrie England_) indicates an element of
the old “Nature” fallacy.
[2] _Rep_., 358 E.
[3] _Annals_, iii. 26; cf. _Germania_, ch. xix. 20, “Neque corrumpere
et corrumpi ‘seculum’ vocatur. ...” Note the identification of “our
age” with corruption; cp. use of _fin de siècle_.
It may be observed at this point that the conception of a “law of
nature” made a very valuable middle term between the conception of a
purely primitive condition of the world and the ideal of a complete
society. The logical reason is plain. The instinct of getting at
something solid and permanent, which first reveals itself by going
back to the supposed original or simple, soon attaches itself also
to what is _generally_ found to exist, understanding generality as
a mark of that tendency to come of itself which it feels to attach
to what is real and able to stand in its own right. But generality
is a clue which leads a long way; and the mind passes from saying
“Fire burns [1] by nature, {130} for it burns everywhere; but law
is variable” [2] to observing that there are features of law which
have their own generality, and there thus appears to be a “natural”
element in law, which may mean the right of the strongest, [3] but
may again amount to a tendency to come out of the “state of nature.”
Just in the same way, the conception of Liberty has always drawn
from experience a certain positive tendency to progress, and has
never perhaps, even in the most fanatical theory, maintained the full
demand for isolation which its negative bearing might seem to imply.
[1] Argument cited by Aristotle, _Eth_., v. 10.
[2] Just so, in strict science, from the Atomists downward, the
primary qualities (spatial) are real, the secondary (colours)
conventional (or, as we say, “subjective”); the former meaning holds
good more generally than the latter.
[3] Plato, _Gorgias_, p. 484.
But again, the instinct which, in looking for what has power to grow
or come of itself, lays hold of what is merely primitive or merely
general, has in all great epochs of thought been met by a deeper
insight.
It is not merely what we are born _as_, or what the world begins
with, that comes of itself. The most ordinary conception of growth
involves maturity, and the term nature in Greek and Latin, as in
English, can indicate not only what we are born _as_, but what we are
born _for_, our true, or real, or complete nature. Thus the great
thinkers of every age have been led to something like Aristotle’s
conception, “what a thing is when its growth is completed, that is
what we call its nature [1] (growth or evolution)”; and so, if we
are to think of “nature” as a whole, it will not be, {131} as when
we speak of “natural” science, an outward world, whether of atoms
or of organisms, contrasted both with God and with Man, “for nature
in Aristotle is not the outward world of created things; it is the
creative force, the productive principle of the universe.” [2] To
us, inclined to contrast the natural at once with the human and
the divine, there is something startling in the vivid reality with
which the Greek thinkers hold the three ideas together. The creative
activity of the divine principle seems for Plato to be actually one
with growth, or nature, or evolution. [3] It may be of interest to
cite the great passage in which Plato lays his finger on the common
fallacy. [4]
“Many learned men say that the elements and inorganic
and organic world below man came by nature and chance,
but that law and justice and man’s works and social
institutions and religion are merely conventional,
variable, and untrue. But we must maintain that law and
religion and man’s works exist by nature, or are not
lower than nature, being the products of mind according
to right reason.” ... “For they give the name of nature
to the origin of the earliest things; [5] but if really
mind is earliest of all things, then _it_ may rightly be
said to be superlatively natural.”
[1] Aristotle, _Pol_., i. i.
[2] Butcher, _Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art_, p. 116.
[3] _Republic_, x. 597.
[4] _Laws_, 889 ff. abridged.
[5] We are not dealing here with Platonic interpretation, but it
seems necessary to point out that, literally taken, this passage
accepts the principle that nature = primary genesis, and sets out to
prove mind to be natural in this sense. We might rather reject the
appeal to succession in Time altogether, as at bottom Plato means
to. But we see how emphatically mind is for Plato the superlatively
natural.
And so, as the universe is for the great thinkers {132} at once
natural and divine, the same applies to human society. Not only in
Aristotle’s trenchant expressions to the effect that the City State
is a natural growth, but in the whole of Plato’s careful analysis
of moral and social life, we find society depicted as a living and
growing creature, in which man’s nature expands itself from more to
more, having its own essence progressively communicated to it. And so
we find that the peculiar naturalness of the primitive and the simple
is only an illusion, caused by the greater difficulty of recognising
the larger individuality which comes both of and to itself in the
later and more complex phases of life. But whatever it was that was
real and that came of itself in the primitive and simple is there to
a greater degree--with more reality and as the same self, only more
complete--in the later and complex. The idea of a diminution of being
as we pass from the simpler to the more developed self is a fallacy
of non-recognition.
Rousseau, as we saw, maintains in words the traditional opposition
between the natural and the civil or moral condition of man. From the
tendency of his views, however, we might have expected that in his
philosophy the wheel would come full circle, and the term “nature”
would revert to its Greek meaning. But this is not the case, though
in Émile there is a compromise which points in some such direction.
Yet a remarkable passage [1] from Burlamaqui, a Genevese jurist, the
earlier contemporary of Rousseau, shows the reversion to the Greek
view of social nature completed in principle.
“La liberté civile l’emporte de {133} beaucoup sur la
liberté naturelle, et, par conséquent, l’état civil qui
l’a produit est de tous les états de l’homme le plus
parfait, et, à parler exactement, le veritable état
naturel de l’homme. L’établissement d’un gouvernement
et d’une puissance souveraine, ramenant les hommes à
l’observation des lois naturelles, [2] et par conséquent
dans la route de bonheur, les fait rentrer dans leur état
naturel, duquel ils étaient sortis par le mauvais usage
qu’ils faisaient de leur liberté.”
[1] Cited in Dreyfus-Brisac’s edition of the _Contrat Social_, p. 39.
[2] Note the value of “natural law” as a middle term equivalent to
the general and rational features of positive law, and forming a
step by which the “natural” is carried beyond the supposed “state of
nature.”
Upon this reversion to ancient usage there followed the movement
of the age of romantic genius and of organic science, and with
Goethe’s Erdgeist and Wordsworth’s religion of Nature the restriction
of the natural to the primitive and simple was destroyed. Nature
still remains a point of view under which we regard what relatively
speaking “comes of itself,” but it has ceased to exist as a
question-begging predicate, attached to pre-social or extra-social
conditions of man.
3. Liberty, as understood by the writers who were discussed in ch.
iii. of the present work, is related to the State much as Nature, in
the mouth of story-telling theory, is related to civilised society.
We saw that Seeley in his _Introduction to Political Science_ [1]
lays it down that “perfect liberty is equivalent to total absence
of government.” And this no doubt fairly represents our first
notion of the matter, when cleared of the limitations imposed upon
it by practical life, which {134} limitations--really a first hint
of the truth--we are apt to mistake for mere sophistications and
imperfections. We noted in Rousseau the surviving contrast between
natural liberty on the one hand and civil or moral liberty on the
other, and we observed that the expanding idea of what was natural
could not be prevented from covering the ground of the civil or moral
life. The thread of connection, or rather the ferment of expansion,
we found to be, in the case of nature, the idea of self-origination.
That was natural which came of itself.
[1] Seeley, quoted p. 91 above.
_(a)_ In the simple ideal of liberty, as equivalent to the absence of
all government--for we must not forget that it is an ideal, obtained
by neglecting the facts of life which run counter to it--there is
clearly embodied a claim which commands our respect. The claim is so
self-evident and so convincing to average human feeling--Mr. Spencer
would indeed say, with some truth, to animal feeling in general--that
its precise nature is seldom stated in distinct language. We have
assumed above that the root of it lies in the claim to be ourselves.
But it is safer to take it in the shape which it actually has for the
average consciousness, and this is the negative shape, as a claim
to be free from constraint. [1] If we ask, “What is constraint?”
the answer is founded on the current distinction between myself
and others as different minds attached to different bodies. It is
constraint when my mind is interfered with in its control of my body
either by actual or by threatening physical {135} violence under the
direction of another mind. A permanent and settled condition of such
constraint, by which I become in effect the instrument of another
mind, is slavery. And it will not lead us far wrong if we assume that
the value put upon liberty and its erection into something like an
ideal comes from the contrast with slavery. The ideal of positive
political freedom presupposes more complex experiences. But Homer
already knows that “Zeus deprives a man of half his manhood when he
becomes a slave.”
[1] We must assume, I suppose, that in Seeley’s sentence “Government”
= “Constraint,” or its _vraisemblance_ is lost.
This, then, we may take as the practical starting point in the notion
of freedom. It is what, with reference to a formed society, we may
call a status; the position of a freeman as opposed to a slave; that
is, of one who, whatever oppression he may meet with _de facto_ from
time to time, or whatever specified services he may be bound to
render, normally regards himself and is regarded by others as, on the
whole, at his own disposal, and not the mere instrument of another
mind.
Thus the juristic meaning of the term liberty, based on the normal
distinction between one self-determining person and another, we may
set down as its literal meaning, and so far the English writers,
of whom Seeley is the latest type, are on solid ground when they
define liberty as the absence of restraint, or perfect liberty as the
absence of all government (in the sense of habitual constraint by
others).
_(b)_ It is obvious that the above definition would be wholly
inadequate to the simplest facts respecting the demands which have
through all history been asserted and achieved under the name
of political {136} liberty. A man may be a long way more than a
slave and yet a long way less than a citizen. If, as Seeley says,
the English writer of the verses, “Ah, Freedom is a noble thing,”
only meant by Freedom, being out of prison, it is certain that he
meant much less than the Greek historian who two thousand years
before used almost the same words. “The right of equal speech,” he
wrote, “demonstrates itself in every way as a noble thing.” [1]
By this, as his words and their occasion make plain, he meant a
certain determinate security for the positive exercise of activities
affecting the welfare of the social whole, and some such security
is always understood to be involved in the notion of political
liberty. But we will content ourselves at this point with noting the
distinction and connection between the negative or juristic, and
the varyingly positive or political conception of liberty. For the
latter is, in its degree, a case of that fuller freedom which we are
about to trace to its embodiment in the state; and the phenomena of
political liberty are covered, of course, by the point of view which
we shall take in indicating the state as the main organ and condition
of the fuller liberty.
[1] Hdt., v. 78.
(c) The connection, we said, between juristic and political liberty
should be observed at this point. It is merely an example of what
we shall find throughout, that the apparently negative has its
roots and its meaning in the positive, and, in proportion as its
true nature becomes evident, its positive aspects become explicit.
There is no true security for juristic liberty apart from political
{137} liberty; and it has constantly been the infraction of juristic
liberty that has been the origin of the demand for a share in highly
positive political duties and functions. Mere protection for person
and property may seem an easy thing to define and maintain with just
a little goodwill; but the questions when, how, and in what sense it
is to be maintained involve the positive character of the political
system, and there is no ultimate security unless that system is
moulded by the whole compass of individuality which society contains.
_(d)_ Recurring then to the literal or elementary sense of liberty,
as the absence of constraint exercised by one upon others, we may
admit that, in going beyond it, we are more or less making use of a
metaphor. [1] We are passing from the idea of non-constraint pure
and simple to the idea of more or less moulding and selection within
the powers and activities of the self. It is true, indeed, and must
be maintained as a fundamental principle, that the “higher” liberty
is also in fact the “larger” liberty, presenting the greater area
to activity and the more extensive choice to self-determination.
[2] But this larger development remains within a positive general
character, and if more alternatives are open, there are also, by
that very fact, more which are closed. We cannot wholly exhaust the
new meaning of liberty as applied to the law-abiding and moral life
of a {138} conscientious citizen even by changing the negative into
the positive, and saying that, whereas mere juristic freedom was
only freedom _from_ constraint, political freedom means freedom _to_
act. The higher sense of liberty, like the lower, involves freedom
_from_ some things as well as freedom _to_ others. And that which we
are freed from is, in this case, not the constraint of those whom we
commonly regard as others, but the constraint of what we commonly
regard as a part of ourself. Here is the reason for saying that, when
we speak of liberty in the higher sense, we must be admitted to be
speaking metaphorically. [3]
[1] In this and the following section I have made great use of
Green’s discussion in the first chapter of the _Principles of
Political Obligation_.
[2] Perhaps I may refer on this head to “Liberty and Legislation” in
my _Civilisation of Christendom_ (Sonnenschein).
[3] But see below, p. 145.
In the straightforward sense of the word, we saw, I am free when
I am not made the instrument of another person’s will through
physical violence or the threat of it. The subtle questions which
may arise with regard to due or undue degrees of influence, by which
I may become the instrument of another’s mind, with more or less
willingness on the part of my own, are here disregarded. I am assumed
to be acting freely so long as I follow the inclination of my mind,
apart from any painful conflict forced upon it by the prospect of
physical interference with its belongings.
But from the earliest ages of ethical reflection, a further sense
has been ascribed to the term liberty. It has been pointed out
by moralists and philosophers--first, perhaps by Socrates and
Plato--that the condition of man as to being himself is fundamentally
affected not only by the power to do what he likes without
constraint, but by the nature of that which he likes to do. The human
{139} mind, it is explained, is never wholly at one with itself,
and the common phrases “self-mastery” or “self-control” are adduced
by way of presenting what we spoke of above as the ethical paradox
of self-government. [1] The mind, then, is treated by a metaphor as
if it were two or more persons; and the term liberty, which applies
_prima facie_ to the non-constraint of one person by another, is
applied to the non-constraint of something within an individual mind
by something else within it. Now, apart from further scrutiny, it
does not appear why the term liberty, when thus applied, should mean
anything of ethical value. As Plato observed, in a passage [2] from
which the current use of all these phrases is probably derived, it
seems absurd at first sight to speak of self-control as a distinctive
predicate of certain states of mind. For surely, within the mind,
that which is controlled must be of the nature of self no less than
that which controls it, so that, in saying that I have self-control,
I am saying that I am self-indulgent; in saying that my mind is free,
I am at the same time saying that it is a slave. Within certain
limits this paradox represents a truth, and the ethical rank of
the elements which coerce and are coerced may be quite oppositely
estimated. We may think fit to call ourselves free either when love
conquers reason or when reason triumphs over love. Still, as Plato
proceeds to point out, the general adoption of the metaphor, the
fact that we think and call ourselves “free” or “self-controlled”
or “fully ourselves” in some cases and not in others; and that we
do not in each of {140} these cases regard the opposite attribution
“slave,” “self-indulgent,” “not ourselves” as equally true with the
former, indicates that some substantial fact is forcing itself upon
us through the metaphor in question. It is the same problem as that
which Professor James has wittily stated when he points out that
“the sluggard, the drunkard, the coward never talk of their conduct
in that way (i.e. as conquering their impulses and temptations) or
say they resist their energy, overcome their sobriety, conquer their
courage, and so forth.” [3]
[1] P. 55.
[2] _Republic_, 430 E.
[3] _Principles of Psychology_, ii. 548.
It is most important, we may venture to observe in passing, not to
understand the substantive fact, or Plato’s presentation of it, as
if it lay in an alternative between two psychological factors, say
intelligence and desire, the one of which was to be preferred and
the other to be repudiated, through some quasi-ethical conception of
rank, such as the supposed affinity of the one factor with divine or
of the other with animal life. We are speaking of the sense in which
it can be asserted that the human self is, comparatively speaking,
free in one kind of life and unfree in another, both being assumed
to be chosen, in the absence of constraint by an external will. It
is plain that the only ground on which such an assertion can really
be sustained is that the one life more than the other gives effect
to the self as a whole, or removes its contradictions and so makes
it most fully what it is able to be, or what, by the implied nature
of each and all of its wants, it may be said really to want to be.
The claims of intelligence and desire in their various phases must be
{141} criticised according to this principle, and not advocated upon
presuppositions drawn from external comparisons.
But our question at the present moment is not as to the deeper
nature of that which we call the self _par excellence_, but as to
the bearing of the metaphor by which the assertion of such a self is
identified with liberty or absence of constraint. And the point is
plainly this; [1] that in the conflict between that which stands for
the self _par excellence_ and that which, at any time, stands opposed
to it, we have the clear experience that we are capable of being
determined by a will within our minds which nevertheless we repudiate
and disown, [2] and therefore we feel ourselves to be like a slave as
compared with a freeman if we yield, but like a freeman compared with
a slave if we conquer. We may be determined by something which not
only is not ourself--for in the greatest moments of life, when our
being touches its maximum, we, in a sense, feel an impulse which is
not ourself--but it is not ourself as something which has got hold of
us by force, and operates upon us by conflict and violence, without
having the kind of power needed to carry us away and sweep our whole
self harmoniously into its current. That we can be determined by a
will in us which neither is ourself nor represents it at a higher
level, and which we loathe and disown, is the experience on which the
metaphor of freedom and slavery is {142} based, when applied to the
life of man considered apart from external constraint. [3]
[1] See Green’s _Principles of Political Obligation_, p. i.
[2] This remains substantially true, even if we agree with Socrates
that it is impossible to know the better and prefer the worse at a
given moment. Our normal self will repudiate the view we took at some
moment.
[3] There is something worthy of Dante in Rousseau’s observation
(_Contrat Social_, Bk. iv. ch. 2, note) that the convicts in the
galleys at Genoa had “Liberty” stamped on their chains. The fetters
of the bad self are the symbol of freedom. Rousseau turns his remark
to commonplace, after his fashion, by referring it to the mere
liberation of society from malefactors.
_(e)_ The metaphorical application of the term Liberty to a state of
the individual mind has both its danger and its justification. The
state of mind in question, we repeat, is that in which the impulse
towards self-satisfaction sets itself upon an object which represents
the nature of the self as a whole, as free from contradiction or as
at its maximum of being, and triumphs over the alien and partial
will, the tendency to narrower tracks of indulgence, when entangled
in which it feels itself oppressed and constrained by a foreign
influence. When the mind does what, as a whole, it wills, as Plato
implies, [1] it feels free. When it cannot be said to will anything
as a whole, but is distracted among aims which cannot satisfy it,
then there is no sense in which it can be said to do what _it_ wills,
and it feels itself under constraint and a slave.
[1] _Republic_, ix. 577 E.
The metaphor has this danger. The contrast between whole and part is
too readily transformed, in popular theory, into the contrast between
an empty generality and everything in particular. The claim to be
free then involves the separation between mind as a general faculty
of volition, and every particular object. Mind is then said to be
free as an undetermined faculty, but as filled and {143} moulded by
any object or idea, (the passive participles “filled” and “moulded”
imply a relation which is not real, but, as assumed, is the ground of
the fallacy in question) it has lost its freedom and become a slave.
But if we retain the conception that mind has reality only as a whole
of determinate character, self-determined through its power of being
a self, but not through any power of creating particulars out of
nothing, we shall avoid this caricature of the higher freedom.
But it is far more important to note the justification of the
metaphor. We saw that, from Homer downwards, the conviction has been
ineradicable that liberty is the true nature of man. And we now
observe that the metaphor, through which the deepest sense of this
quality has expressed itself, depends upon the same principle as
the literal usage from which it is drawn. In the case of Liberty,
conceived as a condition of the mind, just as in the case of Liberty,
conceived as the absence of physical menace or coercion on the
part of other persons, the root of the matter is the claim to be
determined only by ourself. But, in the literal case, what we mean by
ourself is the given self, the group of will and wishes, of feelings
and ideas, associated from time to time with my particular body;
in short, the actual uncriticised “mind,” as we experience it all
day and every day. In the metaphorical case, we have made so much
progress in self-criticism as to know at least that our “self” is
something of a problem. We know that the given self, the mind from
day to day, [1] is not satisfactory; and {144} we throw the centre
of gravity outside it, and place the true self in something which
we rather want to be than actually are; although, at the same time,
it is clear that to some extent we are this something or we should
not want to be it. We realise, indeed, that to be ourselves is a
principle at once of distinction or position among others, and of
thorough transition into and unity with the life which is at the
root of theirs. And it is for this reason that we feel so confident,
in proportion as we at all lay hold upon a life which can thus
distinguish and identify us, that we have here the grasp of what is
in its nature our true self. Here then, as in the literal case of
liberty from personal constraint, we are putting in act the principle
of “being determined only by ourself.”
[1] See, however, note on p. 125 above.
And thus Liberty as understood by “theorists of the first look,” or
by those who in all ages have resisted arbitrary tyranny, belongs
after all to the same principle with the civil or moral liberty
of the philosopher. The claim to obey only yourself is a claim
essential to humanity; and the further significance of it rests
upon what you mean by “yourself.” Now if it is true that resistance
to arbitrary aggression is a condition of obeying only ourselves,
it is more deeply true, when man is in any degree civilised, that,
in order to obey yourself as you want to be, you must obey some
thing very different from yourself as you are. And it has been
well pointed out [1] that the consciousness of civilised peoples
is deeply alive to this significance of liberty, so that any work
of self-improvement may be most effectively {145} presented to a
popular audience as an effort to attain freedom by breaking the
bondage of drink, for example, or of ignorance, or of pauperism.
In spite of the objection that Freedom as thus represented is a
mere metaphor, “the feeling [2] of oppression, which always goes
with the consciousness of unfulfilled possibilities, will always
give meaning to the representation of the effort after any kind of
self-improvement as a demand for freedom.” We have followed the usual
course of English thought, and the example of a writer whose caution
equalled his enthusiasm, in admitting that the lower sense of the
term Liberty is the literal sense, and that the deeper meaning may
be treated as metaphorical. It is worth while to observe that the
justice of this way of looking at the matter is very doubtful. It
is because we know, however indefinitely, that our self has a reach
beyond its daily needs, that arbitrary oppression becomes a thing
to be resisted at the price of life itself. Herbert Spencer draws
attention to the struggles of an animal which we try to confine,
as a proof of the innate feeling of liberty. But the domesticated
animal is the highest animal, or at anyrate not the lowest; while the
man domesticated on similar terms is what we call a slave, because
he has sold his liberty for his life. It is therefore in truth the
sense of the higher liberty--the greatness and unity of life--that
has communicated uncontrollable force to the claim for the lower;
and if the fuller meaning is the reality and the lesser the symbol,
it would be nearer the truth to say that the reality is the liberty
of {146} a moral being whose will finds adequate expression in its
life, of which liberty the absence of external constraint is only an
elementary type or symbol. The claim of the dictionary-maker that the
earliest or the average meaning is also the truest or the “proper”
meaning of words has no foundation. [3]
[1] Green’s _Principles_ p. 18. [2] _Loc. cit._
[3] Nettleship’s _Remains_, i. 27 and 30.
4. Liberty, then, throughout, is the being ourselves, and the
fullest condition of liberty is that in which we are ourselves most
completely. The ideal thus implied may be further explained by help
of the philosophical expression, “The free will is the will that
wills itself.” We have already seen, by implication, the meaning of
this. If we are asked, “But does not our will always will itself?”
we have the answer ready, that in one sense it does, but in another
it does not. We always want what we will, but what we will is not
always what would satisfy our want. A will that willed itself would
be a will that in willing had before it an object that would satisfy
its whole want, and nothing but its want. Its desires would not
be narrow and partial desires, in the fulfilment of which a man
feels choked and oppressed like one lost in a blind alley which
grows narrower and narrower. They would not be artificial desires
stimulated and elaborated into a tyranny of the machinery of life by
the self which gropes for more and cannot find the “more” which it
needs. That is to say, the volitions of the self would have undergone
a process just such as is undergone by a casual sensuous observation
as it passes into a great scientific theory. As the observation
stands it is inadequate to itself; for it poses as a truth, and is
manifestly a false {147} connection. So it is supplemented on the
one hand and purged away on the other; conditions and qualifications
are inserted into it to harmonise it with other knowledge, until
it makes some approach to being an expression of experience fit to
occupy a permanent place in man’s conception of the world. This,
the adjustment of a partial element to unity with the whole, is the
essence of criticism. And it is just such another process by which
the experience of life fills up and purifies the objects presented
to the casual volition. That is to say, the nature of the process
may be represented by considering it as having an effect of this
kind on an unharmonised will; and relatively at any given moment
such a process is in some degree going on. But we must bear in mind
that we are not to think of the sensuous individual as totally prior
in time to the social consciousness, and as a pre-existing matter,
upon which such an effect is to be thought of as super-induced. That
would be precisely the fallacy with which Rousseau struggles so hard,
and the escape from which we are attempting to illustrate; none
the worse, perhaps, if our own language betrays how very difficult
it is to throw it off altogether. We really know the sensuous
individual as such, the will in its impure and uncriticised form,
only in our experience, constant as that is, of failure, error,
and forgetfulness, in adhering to the rational life, which, on the
whole, is inherent in the very nature of our rational being, and
which we only desert in the same way and to the same extent as we
make mistakes in intellectual matters. We go wrong by narrowness and
confusion, by erroneous abstractions out of the whole, in a way only
possible {148} for a social and intellectual being, and not prior to
our entire social and intellectual character.
Understanding then that we are dealing with narrowness and confusion
and their opposites within a social intelligence already existing and
predominant on the whole, we may note the sort of relation in which
the more adequate will is analogous to the more adequate piece of
knowledge.
Take, as we said above, the actual casual will of any individual at
any given moment, especially if it is of a nature which, within the
context of civilised life, we commonly pronounce to be wrong. Let it
be, for example, an impulse of sensual passion. It is a commonplace
that in such impulses the self can find no abiding satisfaction.
They pass and leave him empty. They bring with them no opening out
of fresh possibilities, no greater stability to the mind. Yet they
have their meaning, and belong to human nature. They imply a need for
union, and an attraction outside the immediate self. If we compare
them with the objects and affections of a happy and devoted family,
we see the difference between a less adequate and a more adequate
will. The impulse, in passing into family affection, has become
both less and more. It is both disciplined and expanded. The object
presented to the will is transformed in character. Lawlessness is
excluded; but, in place of a passing pleasure, a whole world of
affections and interests, extending beyond the individual life, is
offered as a purpose and a stimulus to the self. In short--for it
is idle to expatiate upon what everybody recognises at once--you
can make a life out of the one, and you cannot out of the other.
In the family at its best the will has an {149} object which is
real and stable, and which corresponds to a great part of its
own possibilities and capacities. In willing this object, it is,
relatively speaking, willing itself. We might compare in the same
way the mere will to earn our daily bread, with the horizon of a
great intellectual profession; or the routine of an industry or
profession vacantly and formally pursued with the very same routine
conscientiously followed in a spirit of enlightenment. In every case
we are led up to the contrast of the actual indolent or selfish will,
and the will, in as far as it comes to be what its nature implies,
namely, that which we have spoken of as the real or rational will,
embodied in objects which have power to make a life worth living for
the self that wills them.
Now, our nature as rational beings implies the imperative claim
upon us of a will which is thus real or rational. Recognised or
unrecognised, it is rooted in our own wills, as the claim to be
true is rooted in our assertions. Any system of institutions which
represents to us, on the whole, the conditions essential to affirming
such a will, in objects of action such as to constitute a tolerably
complete life, has an imperative claim upon our loyalty and obedience
as the embodiment of our liberty. The only question that can arise
is whether the system is that which it pretends to be. But even
if rebellion is a duty, it can only be so because the imperative
obligation, as we recognise it, is irreconcilable with the particular
system which claims our obedience in its name. The imperative claim
of the will that wills itself is our own inmost nature, and we cannot
throw it off. This is the ultimate root of political obligation.
5. It is such a “real” or rational will that {150} thinkers after
Rousseau have identified with the State. In this theory they are
following the principles of Plato and Aristotle, no less than the
indications which Rousseau furnished, by his theory of the general
will in connection with the work of the legislator. The State, when
thus regarded, is to the general life of the individual much as we
saw the family to be with regard to certain of his impulses. The
idea is that in it, or by its help, we find at once discipline and
expansion, the transfiguration of partial impulses, and something
to do and to care for, such as the nature of a human self demands.
If, that is to say, you start with a human being as he is in fact,
and try to devise what will furnish him with an outlet and a stable
purpose capable of doing justice to his capacities--a satisfying
object of life--you will be driven on by the necessity of the facts
at least as far as the State, and perhaps further. Two points may be
insisted on to make this conception less paradoxical to the English
mind.
_(a)_ The State, as thus conceived, is not merely the political
fabric. The term State accents indeed the political aspect of the
whole, and is opposed to the notion of an anarchical society. But
it includes the entire hierarchy of institutions by which life is
determined, from the family to the trade, and from the trade to the
Church and the University. It includes all of them, not as the mere
collection of the growths of the country; but as the structure
which gives life and meaning to the political whole, while receiving
from it mutual adjustment, and therefore expansion and a more
liberal air. The State, it might be said, is thus conceived as the
operative criticism of all {151} institutions the modification and
adjustment by which they are capable of playing a rational part in
the object of human will. And criticism, in this sense, is the life
of institutions. As exclusive objects, they are a prey to stagnation
and disease--think of the temper which lives solely for the family
or solely for the Church; it is only as taken up into the movement
and circulation of the State that they are living spiritual beings.
It follows that the State, in this sense, is, above all things,
not a number of persons, but a working conception of life. It is
the conception by the guidance of which every living member of
the commonwealth is enabled to perform his function, as Plato has
taught us. If we ask whether this means that a complete conception
of the aims and possibilities of the common life exists even in the
minds of statesmen, not to speak of ordinary citizens, the question
answers itself in the negative. And yet the State can only live
and work in as far as such a conception, in however fragmentary,
one-sided shapes, pervades the general mind. It is not there mostly
in reflective shape; and in so far as it is in reflective shape it
is according to ultimate standards contradictory and incomplete. But
everyone who has a fair judgment of what his own place demands from
him, has, at his own angle, so to speak, a working insight into the
end of the State; and, of course, practical contradictions would be
fewer if such conceptions were completer and more covered by each
other. But a complete reflective conception of the end of the State,
comprehensive and free from contradiction, would mean a complete
idea of the realisation of all human {152} capacity, without waste
or failure. Such a conception is impossible owing to the gradual
character of the process by which the end of life, the nature of the
good, is determined for man. The Real Will, as represented by the
State, is only a partial embodiment of it.
_(b)_ The State, as the operative criticism of all institutions, is
necessarily force; and in the last resort, it is the only recognised
and justified force. It seems important to observe that force is
inherent in the State, and no true ideal points in the direction of
destroying it. For the force of the State proceeds essentially from
its character of being our own mind extended, so to speak, beyond
our immediate consciousness. Not only is the conduct of life as a
whole beyond the powers of the average individual at his average
level, but it is beyond the powers of all the average individuals
in a society taken together at their average level. We make a great
mistake in thinking of the force exercised by the State as limited to
the restraint of disorderly persons by the police and the punishment
of intentional law-breakers. The State is the fly-wheel of our life.
Its system is constantly reminding us of duties, from sanitation to
the incidents of trusteeship, which we have not the least desire to
neglect, but which we are either too ignorant or too indolent to
carry out apart from instruction and authoritative suggestion. We
profit at every turn by institutions, rules, traditions, researches,
made by minds at their best, which, through State action, are now in
a form to operate as extensions of our own minds. It is not merely
the contrast {153} between the limited activity of one individual
and the greater achievement of millions put together. It is the
contrast between individuals working in the order and armed with the
laws, customs, writings, and institutions devised by ages, and the
same individuals considered as their daily average selves, with a
varying but always limited range of immediate consciousness. For at
any given moment, no judge knows all the law; no author knows all
his own books, not to mention those of others; no official of an
institution has the whole logic and meaning of the institution before
his mind. All individuals are continually reinforced and carried
on, beyond their average immediate consciousness, by the knowledge,
resources, and energy which surround them in the social order, with
its inheritance, of which the order itself is the greatest part.
And the return of this greater self, forming a system adjusted to
unity, upon their isolated minds, as an expansion and stimulus to
them, necessarily takes the shape of force, in as far as their minds
are inert. And this must always be the case, not merely so long as
wills are straightforwardly rebellious against the common good, but
so long as the knowledge and energy of the average mind are unequal
to dealing, on its own initiative and out of its own resources, with
all possible conjunctions in which necessary conditions of the common
good are to be maintained. In other words, there must be inertia to
overcome, as long as the limitations of our animal nature [1] exist
at all. The State is, as {154} Plato told us, the individual mind
writ large, or, as we have said, our mind reinforced by capacities
which are of its own nature, but which supplement its defects. And
this being so, the less complete must clearly submit to find itself
in the more complete, and be carried along with it so far as the
latter is able to advance. It is very important to note, however,
that our mind at its best is very different from our mind at its
average; and it has understood and approved, when at its best, a
great deal which in its average moments comes upon it as force or
custom from the outside. Thus, there is no abrupt division between
our conscious mind and the social system of suggestion, custom, and
force, which supports and extends and amends it. The two are related
much as the focus of consciousness is related to the sub-conscious
and automatic habits by which daily life is rendered possible. It is
no more conceivable that social life should go on without force and
authoritative custom, because the end of social life is reflected in
the varying intelligence of individuals, than that individual life
should go on without sub-consciousness and automatism, because it is
ultimately relative to the ends which appear as ideas in the shifting
focus of the mind. The inherent limitations of State action will be
dealt with in a later chapter. We have thus far been attempting to
make clear what is meant by the identification of the State with the
Real Will of the Individual in which he wills his own nature as a
rational being; in which identification we find the only true account
of political obligation.
[1] Not “of our individuality.” Individuality is not, in principle, a
limitation which makes us unequal to our part in the whole.
{155}